NB: This is a guest article by Stuart Lodge, director at RoundTheWorldFlights.
In the last few years we’ve had tsunamis, Sars, earthquakes, floods, terrorism, country-wide strife, strikes and, of course, Eyjafjallajoekull, which created a worldwide ash cloud panic.
The world seems to be getting smaller and more dangerous every day, and moreover these so-called “travel shocks” seem to be amplified by a relentless 24 hour news cycle that seems to demand bad news as it’s raison d’être.
To deal with these ever increasing incidents we have travel alerts from state or foreign affairs departments of most of the major countries with numbers of outbound travellers. However these systems of alerts have not changed a huge amount over the years.
Which is why the Know Before You Go event at the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in London this week threw up an interesting question from it’s new director.
How could the FCO improve their message through technology and social media?
Well, I’ve had a think and here are my suggestions (plus a very rough cost estimate for Her Majesty’s Treasury, or any government agency)
More local tweeting
Local is good. People trust local. Timely information from consular or embassy staff, a lot of whom already have access to specially modified FCO Blackberrys, seems to me to make sense. Maybe a quick training session would be needed on proper use, but a better strategy is probably just to say the following:
- Never tweet something you wouldn’t be happy for a parent to read
- Remember that every tweet is like a postcard – everyone can read it
Total cost:
- Slight modification of existing Blackberries.
Better collation of lists
Organise trusted tweeters into lists – this way people can follow one public list. It would certainly have helped in Japan and Thailand earlier this year.
Maybe collate and update on a national, regional or city basis; Might also be worth adding honorary councils, prominent expats, NGOs, local journalists or local friends of the government agency. But keep it open and transparent.
The cynic in me sees this as a bit of carrot for local folk. Like a double helping of Ferrero Rocher at the ambassador’s Christmas cocktail party.
Total cost for the Treasury:
- Zero.
More Facebook groups
In the words of That Petrol Emotion, you’ve got to “Agitate, Educate and Organise”. Might seem odd to quote a band with distinct Irish Republican sympathies at the FCO this week, but the message is right.
Every consulate and embassy should have a Facebook page. The smarter abassadors and staff will use it as a focal point and hub of the local community, but they can also be “liked” by travellers passing through.
In fact the “likes” give a useful metric as to its popularity. Certainly a lot cheaper than the FCO’s latest initiative with the controversial Vodafone mobile phone company.
Total cost for the Treasury:
- Zero
More live blogging
Inserting a live blog into an embassy’s page need not cost a fortune. In fact there are plenty of plugins such as CoverItLive that are free (with ads).
The other option is for the the FCO to have one on its homepage. Thus avoiding any nasty blocking or downtime that may occur in emergencies and in certain zones of conflict or strife. Or if Mr Putin wakes up one morning with a sudden mistrust of the internet (perish the thought).
Total cost for the Treasury:
- Zero (or get advertisers to pay – choose some good ones though. Avoid Big Oil)
More video blogging
Most travellers don’t want to see a video of William Hague being interviewed after a particularly full and frank luncheon in downtown Kiev.
However a video of how to get to our local consulate from the nearest metro is useful. Or video tips from local staff on ten things to enjoy in-country that are just great. Flip video cameras are under £100 each. Or send in pro teams once a year. Video is good…
Total cost for the Treasury:
- £100 per camera (more if you do it right)
A star system – with email alerts/tweets when they change
At the moment the system used to advise travellers is a blunt weapon. Go, don’t go or go under advisement. I realise that this weapon is very much used as a political tool. But surely a more subtle, effective and pro-active system is a star system.
Perhaps where 0 = Stockholm and 10 = Timbuktu.
Think about the effect of ratcheting up the numbers. There could be tweets when the stars change plus auto email alerts (a system you have at the moment). I could imagine that a change in a country’s status might make front page news locally. You could call this the Lodge Scale™. After me.
Total cost for the Treasury:
- Zero
More complex information – with email alerts/tweets when risks change
Most travellers are not stupid. Give them detailed and intelligent advice and they will listen. However I would like more constructive and practical advice. In other words:
- Don’t Tweet in certain countries
- Don’t use Facebook in certain countries
- Travel in pairs in certain countries
- Don’t take photos at certain times
I would also like a clearer indication of the the risks if this advice is not followed. As a footnote I also think it’s terribly important to put the same amount of effort into ALL SOCIAL MEDIA when a situation, like a natural disaster, has passed.
Total cost for the Treasury:
- Two extra writers on the government site
In a way, local social media from the FCO, could be a perfect example of soft power, if used correctly. But it requires trusting in individuals. I do wonder if ministers or those in charge have the wherewithall to take a risk and trust the people.
To me it’s a bit of a no-brainer. Over to you Mr or Mrs Government.
NB: This is a guest article by Stuart Lodge, director at RoundTheWorldFlights.
NB2: Image via Shutterstock.
About Special Nodes
Great piece Stuart. Certainly a more responsive system with a wider spreading net is exactly what is required. Whilst the FCO undoubtedly does some amazing work and saves many lives, it is also worth noting that they can at times do a great deal of damage to tourist’s plans and travel businesses through the publication of inaccurate or outdated information and warnings. The recent floods in Thailand were a classic example, with central Bangkok (read: the tourist area) not being affected in anyway whilst the FCO implied it was like the 2nd coming of Noah and his ark. Surely efforts would have been better spent on raising awareness for those that were affected (read: the locals) and generating humanitarian assistance for them.
The value of news from the ground in huge and if it is from a validated and trusted source the benefit to travellers would be immense. The information put out by local embassy staff would be credible and come from an educated position.
A note on Video Blogging… Don’t even need a flip camera – most cellphones have a HD video recording functionality
Interesting and thoughtful Stuart. i think original ideas and a bit of a brainstorm is definitly needed. Like the fist comment says the FCO should be applauded for the great work they do with limited resources but their advice can be frustrating for travellers and tour opeartors when advice given is not consistent. ideally, the advice given should be there for British travellers to digest and use to make an informed decision. Unfortunatly the top two levels of advice ‘against all but essential travel’ and ‘against all travel’ takes away that choice because general travel insurance will not cover travellers once this advice is up there. Like Stuart says in ‘more complex information’ above, travellers will listen, and can also make sensible adjustments to the way they travel in some areas if advice is given to prepare travellers better.
Go to the Oz Govt warnings and for Indonesia (where I live) the very first line reads (just under “Reconsider your need to travel” , which by the way is one step short of “Do Not Travel”):
“We advise you to reconsider your need to travel to Indonesia, including Bali, at this time due to the very high threat of terrorist attack.”
Courtesy of: http://www.smartraveller.gov.au/zw-cgi/view/Advice/Indonesia
“Very high risk”
There hasn’t been a terrorist attack in Bali in over six years. Yes, there was a “high profile” bombing in 2009 in Jakarta, some 1,200 km from Bali.
Two lines down:
“We continue to receive information which indicates that terrorists may be planning attacks in Indonesia, which could take place at any time.”
That would be attacks somewhere, in a nation of 17,000+ islands. That’s about as useful as a Nokia.
While I think it’s great that govts give warnings, telling someone that something might happen somewhere, sometime in the future is worse than no warning at all.
A better warning perhaps would be:
“Indonesia has been struck by terrorist attacks in the past, in Jakarta in 2009 and Bali in 2005. The Indonesian authorities have made significant advances in fighting terrorism since then and millions of Australians have visited since and suffered nothing worse than a bit of Bali Belly.”
Or perhaps it’s better just to continue to scare people off (and have them holiday domestically).
Compare the above to the Brits:
“The overall level of the advice has not changed; there are no travel restrictions in place in this travel advice for Indonesia.”
http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/travel-and-living-abroad/travel-advice-by-country/asia-oceania/indonesia1
Quite a contrast that.
So, my point was(!) Yes, I agree social media could be a help, but sometimes the warnings are so out of tilt with reality on the ground, it is difficult to know where to start.
@Nick at Selective “Certainly a more responsive system with a wider spreading net is exactly what is required” Spot on
@Chris at Acacia Good point on mobile phones
@Chris at Oasis “a bit of a brainstorm is definitly needed” Couldn’t agree more
@Stuart at Travelfish. Yup Aussie advice can sometimes be a bit on the consrvative/just plain wrong side. Specially when they confuse Greece and Turkey.
But where do we start is a good question. Here I suppose…
My thinking on more localised tweeting and Facebooking is that you could get a better feel for what is happening on the ground. Almost like a local consular newswire service. You might also get different voices who may contradict official policy. I think travellers are smart enough to take that in.
The major issue with using social input is how do you validate it, there is a lot of room for misuse. A ‘vetting’ system is not suitable as when disaster strikes you need to coordinate a lot of feeds in a short period of time.
I think it could run in tandem with exisisting policies. Have trusted folk on a public list seems to me the way to do it. I know I was following #thaifloodseng some twitter users came through as more trustworthy and hardworking. They could be added to a public list alongside other vetted individuals…
But, as Oasis Chris alluded to above, the major power the FCO has over passengers is the right to negate their travel insurance. This causes real pain for Tour Operators and Travel Agents alike, plus quite a few major anomolies are thrown up.
I don’t understand how a month ago Thailand can be as dangerous as parts of Yemen of the Afghan/Pakistan border. It just does not make sense. Surely a star system is a much fairer (and accurate) system.
As a travel risk management information provider, we aggregate travel threat levels from UK, NZ. AU, US and Cdn governments which frequently will show different threat levels for the same country at he same time, eg Moderate, ok to travel, High, reconsider, and Extreme, do no go there. Check out http://www.eTravelAlerts.com where we provide “know before you go” plus alerts for events affecting travllers plans or safety. Their inconsistencies in lack of adding updating or removing travel advice is consistent !
@DonETT “Their inconsistencies in lack of adding updating or removing travel advice is consistent!” LOL.
Interesting when it comes to travel advice there are a lot of factors that we in the travel industry are not privvy too. Secrets or policies as it were. But I do think with realtime information available to everyone now, the FCO, as a service, have a superb opportunity to be a sensible Voice of Reason in a rapidly changing set of events. It’s often said that what the web doesn’t need is more information but better collating, almost editing of the information available. How much and how they choose to share this information, is for me the bigger challenge. We shall see.
ps got this tweet from the FCO earlier – so someone’s listening
@fcotravel @WilliamJHague @foreignoffice @ukinthailand @rtwflights many thanks for the ideas Stuart; I’ve circulated them around the office
Great article Stuart. The fact that the advice varies so greatly between countries is alarming and very damaging to our industry at times. As we all know, nothing beats local knowledge and real-time advice, although I do accept that some channels are open to abuse so the monitoring of this is essential (as long as it’s not confused with censorship). FCO – glad to know that you’re reading Stuart’s ideas at least!
@ B&W Very good point about monitoring not being confused with censorship.
Still think the key is who collates and edits the lists (from the FCO’s point of view) – trusted bods on it makes sense to me (although even they can screw up).
The thing is that the information is out there *in real time*. Governments can either stick their heads in the sand, like a demented flamingo, and pretend it’ll all go away – but we kind of know it won’t…
Was thinking about it last night – how sad – but it must be worth a pilot scheme. The cost is very low. They can always pull it if it sucks. But suppose the real test will come when the next Travel Shock kicks in.
Must be due one soon
Hi – it’s the Travel Advice Team at the Foreign Office here. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to monitor further comments, but I just wanted to clarify a few points that have been made so far. As I’ve already tweeted, we’re going to look at Stuart’s ideas for using social media and we very much welcome all of the feedback you have provided, so please keep it coming. If you have specific queries, you can always e-mail us at traveladvicepublicenquiries@fco.gov.uk. We also have regular meetings with stakeholders so let me know if you’d like to be involved in these.
The flood defences in Bangkok, and the likelihood that things would deteriorate rapidly, gave us serious concern. The prevalence (and height) of sandbagging in the central areas suggests that others were also expecting significant flooding. Hindsight is of course a great thing, but the situation looked grave for several weeks and we lifted the advice against all but essential travel as soon as the risk had diminished (and ahead of our peers).
Local staff at our Embassies and Consulates overseas do already play a key role in writing our travel advice.
Consistency across the whole travel advice piece is a challenge. While the nature of the risk varies from place to place, we try to achieve consistency by advising against all or all but essential travel only if we consider the risk to British nationals ‘unacceptably high’. In the case of terrorism, this is further defined as ‘situations of extreme and imminent danger – i.e. if the threat is sufficiently specific, large-scale or endemic to affect British nationals severely’.
Co-ordination with other countries’ travel advisories has not yet proved possible. At the moment, I can’t see how this can be achieved without the whole decision-making process slowing down to a near halt and being forced to settle for the lowest common denominator. I think this would be less popular than the current difficulties that I know are caused by inconsistencies between different countries’ travel advice.
We always explain why we’re advising against travel when we can, but if our advice is based on sensitive information this isn’t always possible.
Local messaging is something we are keen to develop (with your help and input), but we have to be careful that any local messaging we put out is consistent with our published travel advice. The FCO was heavily criticised in the aftermath of the Bali atrocity for having made available more privileged advice to local stakeholders than was in the published travel advice.
I was struck by the comment that ‘the major power the FCO has over passengers is the right to negate their travel insurance’. This may be how it appears, but the linkages that have developed between travel insurance policies and our travel advice have not been invited by us. The travel insurance industry has chosen to use our travel advice as a benchmark and reference point. We are of course acutely aware of the resulting knock-on effect FCO advice against travel can have on travellers and the travel industry, and therefore take our responsibility to issue accurate, timely and proportionate travel advice very seriously.
Hi Richard
Appreciate you stopping by and joining the debate on the award-winning Tnooz
Aye now here’s the rub…
I think the trouble the FCO will come up with when designing a better and more up-to-date Social Media Policy (and it does need one)is the contradiction of a travel policy written in Whitehall, managed soberly and conscientiously by the service, and as you put it “with our responsibility to issue accurate, timely and proportionate travel advice very seriously” with the information coming in on Facebook and, probably more importantly, Twitter.
That, for me, was the main issue with what happened in Thailand recently. For a while the advice was pretty much avoid Bangkok, except Suvarnabhumi, but the tweets, blogs and posts we were seeing from the ground kind of made a bit of a mockery of the official FCO advice
This article stands out from memory
http://www.travelfish.org/blogs/chiangmai/2011/10/28/thai-floods-some-government-overreactions/
But I guess the circle you guys are trying to square is to keep the gravitas (and influence that engenders) of a Travel Alert from the UK Government’s Foreign and Commnonwealth Office, whilst responding to events on the ground that are being reported in real-time?
Well happy to help square that rather contradictory circle, and as a stakeholder (always makes me think of vampires) am happy to toddle along to give my opinion on a new policy or indeed Manifesto.
Or maybe you guys could write a post for Tnooz looking for feedback…
Cheers
Stu
ps we may have to disagree on insurance…
Very interesting debate. The comment of the FCO regarding travel insurance caught my eye in that the FCO advice is used as a benchmark for travel insurance companies. I have often wondered about this aspect. The FCO advice is, on balance, fair and well constructed yet it is “one size fits all” advice.
There is no distinction between “Okay to travel to (wherever)” and “okay to travel to (wherever) with a family” (say) … Now, what may be an acceptable risk for, say, a business person may not be acceptable to or indeed, for, a family. Yet, given that the travel insurance industry uses the FCO as an uninvited benchmark, if they say it is okay, then there is no claim.
Perhaps if this points system were adopted, then this may make things easier. It would be necessary for the FCO to engage with the travel insurance side of things, I believe in order to adopt a level at which some discretion may be offered to the actual people travelling, rather than holidaymakers having to travel lest they lose their money – and the sums to foreign destinations could be quite substantial. The FCO may not have invited the link twixt travel insurance and their advice, but it is there, it is used and as such should be not regulated, exactly, but the FCO should be cogniscant of it.
Hi Richard
Thanks for the comments and your response to my example of Bangkok. However if the FCO thought:
the flood defences in Bangkok, and the likelihood that things would deteriorate rapidly, gave us serious concern. The prevalence (and height) of sandbagging in the central areas suggests that others were also expecting significant flooding.
Why not state that rather than use the apocalypse level of warning that was rolled out? People should be entitled to make their own decisions based on fact rather than the FCO ‘playing it safe’ surely? I spoke with my contacts in Bangkok on a daily basis and was advised real time what was happening. And the message was consistently that there was no danger to visiting tourists. To warn against travelling to a destination based on the height of some sandbags seems a very strange approach.
Interesting tweet this:
RT @foreignoffice: Many of our Embassies and High Commissions are also on Facebook. See full list: http://ow.ly/831id
One of the recurring themes in the feedback we get from the travel industry is the demand for a much more sophisticated product. It’s my job to try to deliver what our customers want, and some of this can be done through reprioritising, but I’m afraid that much of what is being asked for would require a large influx of resources.
I did not have time to explain the huge effort that we put into monitoring the floods and the sources of information we drew upon, but I think it’s a bit unfair to summarise my earlier comment to the effect that we were advising against all but essential travel based on the height of the sandbags. Of course this was not the case.
With regard to the question of advice v information, much of the feedback we get from travellers is that they do want advice.
We also suffer enormous consequences a the hand of FCO advice, which at times seems over-zealous.
I agree with writers above that a star rating system would be helpful, so that travellers can see that Somalia is more dangerous than Sukhumvit.
Would also be nice to see some collusion between some governments re where is dangerous – e.g. after the Bali bomb in 2005, the island was deemed safe to return to by the Dutch govt long before the FCO sounded the the all clear.
I also wonder how objective the advice is. If the 9/11 attacks had happened in Malaysia or Morocco, would the subsequent travel advice have been the same?
Hi Richard – thanks for stopping by again.
Look don’t want to go down the travel advice line again, although part of the reason there are so many comments about it is there are very few forums where FCO decisions can be discussed publically in a constructive manner. There is a lot of pent up anger about certain decisions from within the industry but as you said…
“We are of course acutely aware of the resulting knock-on effect FCO advice against travel can have on travellers and the travel industry”
I think the industry (especially Nick @selective Asia and Haydn @travel_nation) just want you to pass on how accutely aware we are of your advice and how it affects everything we do; it’s sensitive, potentially company breaking, advice.
But, big picture SM-wise, there is always going to be a conflict between what is tweeted and blogged on the ground during a crisis and the lag between that affecting FCO advice. I still think a dual approach is better. Official advice and a list of officicial tweeters or bloggers as it were.
But happy to share my ideas the next time there’s a forum.
Cheers Stu
Hi all,
Stuart Lodge has followed up on this original piece with a new article looking at the FCO’s new traffic light system:
http://www.tnooz.com/2012/01/05/news/online-traffic-light-system-for-travel-safety-advice-is-good-but-needs-refining/